>>The X-37

Yes, but it glides in to land at a leisurely pace, and would be easy to shoot down.

The danger with craft at hypersonic speeds is that they are almost impossible to shoot down or defend against.

>>basically a rocket that propels to hypersonic speeds, nothing new

I'm not an expert on any of this, but many US military figures have commented the Chinese craft exceeds US capabilities.

Also, it can stay in orbit in space with nuclear weapons for prolonged periods of time, before re-entering Earth at hypersonic speeds - so this isn't something that anyone has been able to do before.

Submission Statement

Stratolaunch has been around for a while. Way back in 2011, they were a contender with SpaceX to launch the earliest iterations of the Falcon rockets. While this aircraft was initially developed to launch rockets into space. Presumably, that hasn't worked out, but they see another opportunity - hypersonic research. China seems to have taken a lead in that, which must be funneling US DoD money in that direction.

I wonder will anyone ever crack the nut that is a successful horizontal space launch from aircraft? Virgin Galactic tried in recent weeks and failed. Using this approach for small payloads of 500 kg or so seems most likely to succeed. Among the many problems this approach has, is that building rockets (that are mainly fuel containers for their small payloads) that can take both horizontal and vertical stresses is hard.

Submission Statements

The potential losses of existing freshwater supplies are one of the most terrifying aspects of climate change. The River Po in Italy has severely shrunk, as the snow in the Alps that feeds it, is becoming less and less due to climate change.

If that were to happen to the rivers the Himalayas feed, in India, China & SE Asia, it would be a far worse disaster.

It's hopeful to see credible tech solutions like this. As the technology works best in the sub-tropics, it could be powered by solar or wind.

>>They do not care.

That doesn't seem a correct way to characterize the situation.

China gets almost 45% of electricity from renewables, which is double what the EU or US does.

Furthermore, not only are they building all their own solar capacity, they are building most of the rest of the world's too, and account for 80% of global production.

Looked at that way, it might be fairer to say its Europe and America that "doesn't care".

Submission Statement

Some of the facts and figures in this report are truly staggering - "In the 2022-2025 period, we expect China’s renewable power generation to increase by almost 1,000 TWh, equivalent to the total power generation of Japan today." - yet as China is growing so fast, that is only going to put a small dent in its coal use.

If there is any silver lining its that the IEA has previously said that relatively small tweaks in government policies on financial backing and planning could accelerate renewables adoption by a further 25%.

Airbus's plans for their hydrogen powered A380 jumbo jet seem more like the future of aviation.

My 2023 Predictions.

Open AI's GPT-4, and other LLM-based AI developments will seem like major advances. They will add fuel to the long-running debate about AI/Robots eventually being able to perform most human jobs.

New waves of Covid will occur, but few places will return to lockdown conditions. China may be the country with the worst problems in this regard.

In politics, around the world, the issue of a generational divide in terms of cultural outlook and access to economic opportunities becomes much more prominent.

Self-driving robo-taxis, without safety drivers, will spread to more cities around the world. Inevitably there will be some accidents, and these will be seized on by people opposed to robo-taxis.

A gene-editing breakthrough gives major hope as a cancer treatment.

The EU's role as global tech/AI regulator will grow stronger. New laws on disinformation, hate speech, transparency, and consumer protection will start to come into legal force in 2023, and we'll be hearing much more about what they deal with.

A general purpose easily trainable robot that becomes commercially available will seem a major step forward in robotics adoption.

An internal coup against Vladimir Putin seems a strong possibility, as Russia continues to fail and weaken. Ukraine attempting to split the Russian forces in two, and isolate the Kherson/Crimea region from supply lines, prior to retaking it, may its biggest military move in 2023.

Workers striking become more common across the western world, as inflation and stagnating wages continue a trend of declining living standards.

Several uncrewed moon landings by different nations publicize the topic of the US & China's plans for crewed moon bases in the 2030s.

A breakthrough in battery technology points to a future for batteries beyond the current lithium-ion model.

Global renewables deployment continues to outpace predictions. The conversation around this will feature more talk of grid upgrading and grid storage, rather than just solar and wind power generation.

>>How much cheaper is cheaper?

If they were trying to do this in 3 days like the Apollo missions, then doing it this way is a fraction of the cost. The issue is that a traditional Hohmann transfer orbit you need to use fuel to both accelerate the craft and deaccelerate it at the other end. This requires you to carry several times the payload weight in propellant.

By comparison Hakuto-R M1 needs only a tiny amount of propellant from ion thrusters, as the Sun's gravity is doing almost all the work.

Submission Statement

I expect we're going to hear a lot more about ballistic lunar transfer trajectories in years to come. They are a much cheaper way for materials to reach lunar and cislunar orbits. Their disadvantage is slowness, but three days versus three months doesn't really matter so much for uncrewed missions. Their big, big advantage is the Sun's gravity does most of the work for you in getting to the Moon. This way you don't need lots of fuel, and get a much cheaper launch from Earth. They are the preferred method for getting cargo to the Lunar Gateway space station.

Hakuto-R M1 is packing a lot into 340 kg (about the weight of 4 domestic washing machines) - including a lunar rover vehicle.

Submission Statement

Ultrasound energy transfer is already the basis of one of ultrasound's most well-known applications, ultrasound medical scanning.

We often tend to think of robots as large and humanoid, if their design wasn't burdened by the need for a power source, it's not hard to imagine useful robots on the same scale as insects, and perhaps just weighing a few grams.

Submission Statement

At the pace that the AI behind this is developing, I wonder where the next order of magnitude increase in capabilities will take us? Then what will the robot an order of magnitude more capable of it be like? It seems conceivable that robots capable of doing most unskilled work will exist by the end of the decade.